✒Mysteriously billed as someone who's spent "A life in business", rookie BBC1 controller Danny Cohen takes to the pages of the upcoming issue of GQ to share his worryingly fragmentary thoughts on, well, all kinds of things, really. Sounding like an Oxford-educated, telly-obsessed cabbie, Cohen rambles on, revealing that he "meditates every morning for 15 minutes" and has "done that for the past five years" (ie, throughout his BBC3 stint, so possibly fine-tuning legendary programme titles such as Fuck Off I'm Fat, or deciding whether to green-light a D-lister's diatribe against, say, thongs). He also riskily rules out copycat shows on BBC1 in denouncing "looking at what other people have done and then trying to do something like it" as "a common error"; and actually believes "the daily attacks [on the BBC] from some quarters" (we catch your drift, Danny) "aren't for the good of the country ... The degree of criticism it currently receives is ... not in the best interests of Britain." Such a bold start to his controllership must be applauded, although his PR minders may see implicitly labelling the Daily Mail as unpatriotic so early in his reign as needlessly provocative.

✒Also unpatriotic in Cohen's terms is the prime minister, if a report in the Telegraph can be believed. David Cameron is said to have told a BBC reporter after giving an interview on youth unemployment that his bosses "at the BBCC" ought to recognise the government's plans as a good news story. Asked to explain the initials, the former ITV PR man reportedly translated them (with an unpleasant hint of schadenfreude) as short for "the British Broadcasting Cuts Corporation"; although he was clearly in a bad mood, and the possibility that the reporter misheard an example of James Naughtie/Andrew Marr-style potty talk remains to be explored.

✒In the same paper's City diary, the fascinating vendetta against the Financial Times continues, with sardonic attention to the FT's decision to "push financial news into second place" behind events in the Middle East on Monday. Suggesting why the Pink 'Un might be "casting an eye towards Libya", Wednesday's piece slyly noted that "riding high at number five on the shareholder register of the FT's parent company Pearson is none other than the Libyan Investment Authority – the Great Socialist People's sovereign wealth fund". No defence was mounted, as the FT is still loftily ignoring these pesky jibes; but a leader in the latest Economist (also Pearson-owned) might be seen as addressing the issue obliquely by thundering against governments over their dealings with Gaddafi's Libya while suggesting that businesses were not necessarily so guilty - "oil firms", for example, "could justifiably claim they helped western consumers and Libya's people".

✒When ITV executives were drawn to Daybreak as the title for their GMTV replacement, they were warned that this could be a name with a curse – it is also what the sinking and fractious breakfast show is called in the Harrison Ford-Diane Keaton film Morning Glory. They went ahead with it anyway, and may be wishing they hadn't. Now the possibility that a bidder called Channel 6 could be Jeremy Hunt's choice to realise his dreams of local TV has those annoying wiseacres shaking their heads knowingly again. For Channel 6 is the name of Springfield's local TV station in The Simpsons, notably home to Kent Brockman, the foul-mouthed, ridiculously overpaid news anchor best known for the saying "I, for one, welcome our new [add relevant word as applicable] overlords". The book Planet Simpson describes him as typifying "some of the modern news media's ugliest biases", so a Channel 6 monicker would lend inauspicious associations to Hunt's brave new world.

✒"It's like the political editor going surfing during a general election," tweeted James Jones – a director of current affairs programmes for Channel 4, where few opportunities for bashing BBC news and Panorama are spurned – in response to a Guido Fawkes story that Jeremy Bowen had gone on a half-term skiing trip; and indeed the BBC's London-based Middle East editor has not been sighted on air during the Libyan crisis (and didn't return Fawkes's calls), leaving Gavin Hewitt – doing his best to look gritty and on the front line in Malta, but perhaps most agonised by apparently not having a film crew in tow – as the most senior correspondent covering the story. For also invisible at the time of writing is world affairs editor John Simpson, last seen in Cairo. But he needs to be there when history is made, for his next book as well as to brief Huw Edwards, and met Gaddafi (who broke wind loudly) when his control of his country still seemed unthreatened. So it can be confidently predicted that Simpson is making his way undercover to Tripoli, dressed either as a peasant woman or in a roomier version of a Lawrence of Arabia outfit.

✒For months rumours have been circulating that Prince Charles, as Prince of Wales, has been keeping a watchful eye on the fate of S4C, given his concern about safeguarding both the Welsh language and Scottish Gaelic. Now it seems that one of his private secretaries, Dr Manon Williams, the sister of William Hague's wife Ffion, who's been keeping up to speed with developments, has considered putting herself forward as the next chair of S4C, as it attempts to stabilise after a tumultuous year. It is not known whether her name is on the list of candidates to be interviewed on Thursday.

✒After tea-time next Saturday, Channel 4's schedule up to 3am insultingly consists of four Come Dine with Me repeats, two more repeats (River Cottage Every Day, Seven Ages of Britain), and two movies, with only 35 minutes of news and opinion by way of new material – so much for the harvest of original programming due to be reaped with the funds freed up by cancelling Big Brother. Are its executives always away and not watching telly at weekends, and so assume no one else worth catering for does? Or do they look at Richard Desmond's weekend schedule on Channel 5 (even less new fare, with only 10 minutes of news) and like what they see? Or both?

• The following correction was printed in the Corrections and Clarifications column on Wednesday 2 March 2011. Our Media section went to press on Friday 25 February with its Media Monkey's Diary noting (external) blogging and tweeting to the effect that Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor, was not in evidence during the Libya upheavals because he was on a half-term skiing trip. When our section appeared in Monday's paper, Jeremy Bowen had been broadcasting from Libya through the intervening weekend; he had been waiting for a visa. World affairs editor John Simpson, also mentioned as absent from the story, was indeed reporting from Benghazi